More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don’t fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
You make elites care by having leverage over them. You get leverage and power through various ways, but one of them is a majority of the population being able to understand when the wool is being pulled over their eyes. My point is not that people need to bootstrap, it is that they are powerless without reading skills (in agreement with most of this thread). If they want to be able to protect themselves/ have rights, then they need to arm themselves with the tools to defend those rights: basic logic, reasoning, and reading.
You will never be able to guilt someone with power into giving it up. Maybe a few of them innately have no desire to hold onto it, but the vast majority of people that have clawed their way to the top were… Well, willing to claw others.
It may be hard, and the odds may be stacked against them, but we need to fucking get the underprivileged there if we want to survive. Or you cater to their current state of ignorance and reap the rewards.